Aeris Gainsborough vs Akuma vs Geno vs Squall Leonhart 2007
Results Round One Monday, October 1st, 2007 Ulti's Analysis This was a very interesting match, because when you get a bunch of Square into a poll it's always more fun than putting a bunch of Nintendo together. Specifically, we'd get to figure out two things here. One, Squall vs Aeris was an argument in the stats topic for years and years and we would finally get a match to test it. Secondly, this was Akuma's first-ever contest match after years of hype and it was set up perfectly for him to do well. Akuma would end up doing well, and probably wins a match or two with better bracket placement, but in this match we saw all three Square characters basically unable to LFF each other. Squall may have held Aeris down a bit, but not nearly enough to make a difference in the match. The actual match was over in seconds, but Akuma doing this well was pretty cool for us Street Fighter nuts. He also held serve really well during the beastly FF7 day vote and even cut some votes off the lead near the end. If Akuma would ever get good bracket placement, he'd win some matches. As-is, he's gotten into two contests and had to deal with Squall twice. This also settled any lingering Aeris > Squall possibilities. Squall will never lose that match 1 on 1, especially with Aeris not getting into the first two Dissidia games. Stats and Analysis this was one of the last matches of round 1. in that time, two things had happened time and again: * matches featuring two or more characters from the same fanbase/series/company/etc had all underperformed, due to the fanbase split; * fighting game characters had been doing great. thanks to this, one of the more interesting matches was this one, a match where the Square fanbase was split two ways (some would say three with Geno -- I'll be conservative), and one where Akuma had every chance to shine. yes, Aeris was light years ahead of where Akuma was expected to be -- it's doubtful Akuma's even above Ken, and Aeris would crush him -- but this match was tailor-made for him. we'd seen weirder things, anyway. Aeris started out the match with the lead, but it wasn't by much and Squall really got hammered by the early vote. the two went nearly even with the overnight vote, and Aeris has a truly awful day vote for some reason. she lost it to a Chrono Trigger character last year, after all. given that Squall is a big day vote, would Akuma have enough to come back? the answer was a resounding no, thanks to Street Fighter's legendarily bad morning vote. Aeris built up an insurmountable lead and made the match fairly anticlimactic. Akuma stalled her completely by 6pm-ish and slowly started cutting into her lead towards the end. the only other thing of note here was that the match ran 35 minutes late, and Akuma took advantage of them to get the match another 200 votes closer. not a bad attempt for Akuma, but proof that he isn't above Ken or Chun Li on the Street Fighter Popularity Scale. Match Trends External Links * Match Updates * Guru Match Predictions * Oracle Match Results • Previous Match • Next Match Category:2007 Contest Matches